BAY AREA DATELINES

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, September 16, 1995

AH: Court to rule on old molestation cases

San Francisco The state Supreme Court will decide whether a new state law can be used to prosecute child molesting cases that are decades old.

After previously signaling that the prosecutions would be barred, the court Thursday granted a hearing to prosecutors in Mendocino and Humboldt counties who sought to use the law for cases that dated to the 1960s and 1970s.

Under the former law, the statute of limitations was three or six years from the date of the incident, depending on the seriousness of the charge.

The new law, effective in 1994, was prompted by cases in which adults said they had repressed the memory of childhood abuse. The law allows a molestation prosecution within a year of the time an accusation is reported to police.

Cop accused of lewd

act pleads innocent

San Francisco A San Francisco police officer accused of watching a 13-year-old boy masturbate while they were alone in a room at Mission Station pleaded not guilty Friday.

Officer Donnie Cartwright, 39, appeared before Superior Court Judge Alex Saldamando for arraignment on one felony count of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 in connection with the April 12 incident.

The boy alleged at a hearing that Cartwright had touched his penis through his pants, made him strip from the waist down and asked him to masturbate while the boy's parents were being arrested in another room on shoplifting charges.

Cartwright's attorney, Joe O'Sullivan, said, "We have statements from (the boy's) teachers who say he's a delightful kid but that he's simply not trustworthy."

$2 million bail in

Santa Rosa shooting

Santa Rosa A Sonoma County judge set bail at $2 million for a 65-year-old woman accused of trying to murder her husband, the former business manager for "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz.

Shirley Nelson, reportedly distraught over the breakup of her 28-year marriage and revelations that her husband was seeing another woman, allegedly shot her husband twice in the back as he worked at the cartoonist's offices in Santa Rosa. He almost died from the wounds.

Shirley Nelson then shot herself in the chest, but she has recovered. She has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder.

Her husband was fired by Schulz after the shooting. Schulz said he wanted to make changes in his organization.

Stanford gets OK

on radioactive waste

Stanford Stanford University has won preliminary approval to build a larger building to store low-level radioactive waste without conducting an environmental study.

Santa Clara County gave the go-ahead Thursday despite complaints from some area residents, who argued that the project's impact should be studied. Stanford now must seek a building permit.

Stanford wants to build a 6,500-square-foot building, which would boost the university's waste-storage capacity by 40 percent. It would consolidate wasted stored elsewhere on campus.&lt;